


Kushiel's Curse

by lizbetann



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Carey
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-08
Updated: 2007-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-09 06:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbetann/pseuds/lizbetann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Melissande had made her offer to Phedre one day earlier, if when Joscelin stormed La Dolorosa, Phedre was already gone... what might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kushiel's Curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raindrops on Roses](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Raindrops+on+Roses).



  
  
  
  
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## Kushiel's Curse

by Lizbetann

When he was found, finally captured after these long years, I had him brought to the City quietly. I toyed with the idea of setting him up in a cage and parading him through the streets, the traitor, the apostate. But the memory of Elua's children was long, and some might remember that he had been a hero during the Bitterest Winter. I was in neither so precarious a position that I needed an enemy of the state on which to deflect hatred, nor in so secure a position that I could wisely risk public opinion turning against me.

No monarch is in a secure enough position for that.

Accordingly, when he was caught, living like a wild man in the mountains of Siovale, I did not parade him through the streets. I brought him to the palace, to a private room. One door in, and another door out. One door was guarded by a half a dozen guards. I did not rise to the position that I hold, Queen of all Terre d'Ange, by under-estimating my enemies.

And Joscelin Verreuil was my enemy. I never doubted that.

He'd been stripped of every weapon, even the steel vambraces that he always wore. Dressed in rags, his hair hanging in an untidy queue down his back, he still was beautiful. So Cassiel himself might have looked, standing at Elua's side through their wanderings. The Perfect Companion, the incorruptible angel.

We stood in that small, barren room, staring at each other. At my right hand, Prince Imriel watched with careful alertness. I wanted my son to see this, to see how traitors were dealt with.

"Messieur Verreuil," I said coolly. For all his beauty, he had never stirred me. For all of mine, I'd never stirred him. Only one woman had been able to draw him from his vows of celibacy. "Do you know why you are here?"

He bowed to me, arms crossed over his chest. He'd learned subtlety sometime, for the bow was shaded to a fine point of irony. "To be executed, lady."

"Come, come. Lady is what I was born. Queen is what I've made myself. Even you cannot deny that I, at my husband's side, am ruler of Terre d'Ange. And why would I go to the effort of bringing you all the way to the City of Elua in order to kill you? Were that my plan, it would be better to have been done in Siovale, quickly, quietly, and lose your body in the mountains there."

Joscelin closed his eyes. "I see no benefit to you in my continued life. Unless it amuses you to torture me."

I brushed that away. "You're not that amusing to torture. So stoic, inured to pain. Nothing like dear Phèdre."

I'd lied; his pain was enormously entertaining. Particularly the agony that beamed from his eyes when they snapped open at Phèdre's name. "Phèdre's dead," he said in a voice scraped raw by grief. "She died ten years ago, in prison. In a prison you sent her to. My lady." The last two words were bitten out, and if he'd had a weapon, any weapon at all, I'd be dead where I stood.

I did not let that upset me. I wasn't just baiting him; I had a plan. "I did send her to prison. To La Dolorosa, to sit in her own filth and be driven slowly mad by the sound of an immortal's mourning wails. But I only left her there long enough for her to appreciate what it was like. And then, I offered her a choice."

Joscelin buried his face in his hands. He was breaking, bone by bone and sinew by sinew. I placed my hand on Imriel's head, watching Joscelin, waiting for the right moment to finish the destruction.

"A choice," I said again, softly, though no one would mistake my tone for gentle. "She could remain at La Dolorosa, stay there and go mad until she rotted. Or, I could offer her another prison."

Leaving him to think on what I said, I stepped back. I deliberately turned my back on Joscelin. People will believe what you say and show about them. By treating him as powerless, I rendered him so.

I unlocked the other door and threw it wide. Within, manacled to a sturdy wooden bar and curled into a pile of pillows and silks, lay Phèdre.

She blinked and looked up, startled. The walls were too thick for her to have heard us, so I could savor her shock and Joscelin's at the same moment. I stepped into the room, and Imriel followed me. Nothing but empty space remained between Joscelin and Phèdre. He stumbled forward the few steps it took to enter the room, well-lit compared to the outer chamber, and then stopped, as though yanked on a lead.

Phèdre tugged on her bonds, using them to lever herself upright. "Joscelin?" she whispered, her voice breaking with love and hope. "Oh, Elua, please don't be a dream."

The power of what lay between them charged the air. They'd both forgotten I was there, forgotten the world to see only each other. Phèdre may be Kushiel's Chosen and I his scion, but a greater hand than his had bound their hearts together. Perhaps only Elua could how these two loved.

Joscelin stepped toward her. "Stop," I commanded. "As I said before, I offered Phèdre a choice. La Dolorosa, or this." With one hand I indicated the luxurious room, the instruments of tortuous pleasure that lined the walls. "This is what she chose."

"What do you want, Melisande?" Joscelin asked harshly.

Imriel snarled to hear me so rudely addressed and stepped forward, but I stopped him with one hand on his shoulder. "No, love, he's rather earned the right to speak to me so. To answer your question, Messieur Verreuil, I want your help. As you know, we've been at war with Alba these ten years past. Drustan took the news of the death of his bride at the hands of one of her Cassiline guards... badly. He persists in believing that I and my husband had something to do with that tragedy." Drustan had been raiding our shores since Ysandre's death. And the Master of the Straits allowed his passage while refusing ours in return, Kushiel curse him.

"Drustan trusts you," I continued calmly. "I want you to go as an emissary on my behalf, and convince him to stop this pointless war."

Joscelin was shaking, a fine tremor upsetting his perfect discipline. Hence the need to break him outside, the way I'd broken Phèdre to my hand for all these long years.

It surprised me, then, when Phèdre spoke into the silence. "And what would you have us believe, Melisandre? That if Joscelin does this thing, we will go free?"

I laughed, a lighthearted, tinkling sound. "Of course I won't let you go free," I said fondly. "But I will allow you to see each other. Occasionally. And you never know. I could die. Messieur Verreuil could come up with a daring plan to rescue you." I shrugged. "You, my dear one, could outwit me. It's in Elua's hands."

Phèdre stared at me steadily, but I could read nothing in her blood-pricked gaze. Then she turned her head away, breaking our locked gazes. I knelt beside her on the cushions and caressed her cheek, trailing my hand down to cup her breast through the thin white gown she wore. The nipple hardened under my fingertips, and she shuddered, drawing in her breath in a gasp of desire.

Satisfied I'd made every point I needed to, I rose from the pillows. As I turned, Joscelin lunged towards Imriel. His hands were like claws, reaching. Even before I drew breath to scream, I darted in between Joscelin and my son, seeking to protect him from whatever murderous rage I had unlocked in the Cassiline.

With swift grace, Joscelin checked his move and whirled towards the wall of weapons. The wall Phèdre had been facing. She hadn't been looking away from me, she had been directing Joscelin's attention to the whips, chains, and knives that hung there.

Before I could even think to stop him, he plucked two daggers from the wall; narrow, elegant things. Two daggers, one for my heart and one for Imriel's. I pushed Imriel behind me and held my arms out to my sides, protecting my son as best I could..

Then I saw that neither of us were his targets.

Phèdre was sitting up straight in her nest of silks and feathers, head up, eyes fixed on Joscelin. And Joscelin... he held one dagger in his right hand, poised to throw. The other, in his left, was pressed to his throat.

The _terminus_.

Faster than thought, Joscelin threw the dagger. Its aim was true, and it sank into Phèdre's breast. He paused for a scant moment, tears streaming down his face, his entire being fixed on Phèdre's face.

Then he drew the dagger he still held across his own throat.

I was already in motion, flinging myself down beside Phèdre, lifting her, calling for the guards, calling for my personal physician. In my hands she lay like a broken flower. She clutched the dagger in her breast to her like a lover, and smiled up at me.

"I call -" she paused to cough, blood coming from her mouth, "my lord Kushiel's curse down on your head, Melisandre. My blood is on your hands. My death is your responsibility." She paused again, struggling to speak. "Ten thousand years," she whispered. She tried to draw breath, to speak again, and instead sagged in my arms, her eyes open and staring.

While I watched, the red fleck of Kushiel's mark faded from her eye.

I couldn't move. Surely if I sat still long enough, refusing to believe, it would not be true. I breathed scarcely more than the body in my arms, willing time to stop, to run backwards, to erase this.

Imriel put his hand on my shoulder. I turned to see that the spray of blood from Joscelin's death had marked him, a red ribbon sash across his doublet. One of my eyes was stinging, and I thought, not from tears, surely not.

Imriel was bone-white, and his fingers dug into my arm. It seemed to take the last of my strength, but I rose and held him to me. I don't know who drew more comfort from the contact; him, or myself.

Guards filed into the room, and I raised my chin and faced them. The captain of the guard looked me full in the face, and flinched. I ignored it. "Dispose of these bodies," I said coolly.

The guard swallowed. "Where, Your Majesty?"

I stared him down. "I hardly think it matters, Captain. See it done." Holding Imriel's hand, I swept from the room.

But I could not forget Phèdre's last words.

_~Ten thousand years.~_

 

********

 

Imriel made his way to a quiet corner of the palace. No one had observed him come this way.

In a suite of rooms, well away from the main court and largely ignored, lived Ysandre's Queen's Poet, Thelesis de Mornay. His mother had selected a new poet upon her ascension, but the former one remained. Too ill to make appearances, she stayed in her rooms always, attended by her faithful servants.

Imriel had never had cause to think of her before. Her days of prominence had come before his birth, and he'd never seen her though they lived in the same building. But he'd spent the last two months gathering information about what he had witnessed.

He had to be careful, discreet. If it came to his mother's ears that he was asking about Phèdre no Delaunay, about Joscelin Verreuil, about the death of Queen Ysandre, she would close every avenue of inquiry. He could not ask too much of any one person, just enough to know where to garner the next piece.

All his questions and intelligence had lead him here, to this door.

It opened after a long pause, and the startled maid who saw him curtsied instantly. "Prince Imriel!" she said in shock.

"The prince?" a voice asked behind her, from the dim of the room. It sounded like a voice out of legend, like a melody heard from far away, too distantly to hear clearly, but tantalizing with its beauty.

The maid stepped aside as Imriel entered. It was overly warm in the room, kept at the temperature of a sickroom. He stopped in front of Thelesis, and bowed.

"I beg your forgiveness, prince, but I cannot rise. What do you wish of me?"

Imriel thought a moment. All his questions, and he'd never considered what to ask if he did not want to be circumspect about it. "I want the truth," he said finally.

Thelesis smiled sadly. "There are many truths, my prince. Which do you want?"

"I... I want Phèdre no Delaunay's truth. And Joscelin Verreuil's."

Thelesis leaned forward, dark eyes burning with urgency. "Where did you hear those names?"

Imriel caught and controlled his voice before he answered with stark honesty. "I watched them die."

Thelesis fell back in her chair with a keening cry of pain. With infinite patience, Imriel waited as she mourned, until her attention returned to him. Her voice was foggy when she spoke again, and heart-wrenching strains of elegy wound through it now rather than wistful beauty. "They say the Queen has a mark of red in her eye, verily like that of Phèdre's, that appeared a month or more ago. Is it true?"

Imriel nodded. "As she lay dying, Phèdre cursed her. And said, 'ten thousand years'. Do you understand what that means?"

Thelesis pressed one hand to her face, the picture of weakness. Then she lowered it and her gaze went through him like a dagger. "Phèdre was Kushiel's Chosen, his hands in this world, his tool for justice. I do not think that the mark in your mother's eye bespeaks the same fate. I think it is a mark that Kushiel heeded his Chosen in her last moments. The stories say that one who kills his Chosen shall suffer a thousand years in his hell for the blasphemy. Except for Kushiel's own scions, the children of his loins. For them, the punishment is ten thousand years."

Imriel swallowed, and nodded. "My mother had Queen Ysandre killed, didn't she?"

Thelesis's look was almost pitying when she nodded. "Yes, my prince. And what will you do with this knowledge?"

Imriel shook his head. "I don't know," he said, sounding as lost as the ten year old boy he was. Then his expression hardened. "But I will not forget."

 

The End  
  
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